Description

Synopsis

Between 1980 and 1995, Peru lived an internal war unleashed by the party of maoist inspiration: the Shining Path. Almost 70 thousands people died during this war. Chungui’s area, which belongs to the departament of Ayacucho, in the central mountain, has been one of the most harmed by the Shining Path and the State Forces, who committed serious excess.

In 1996, when wounds of the war were still fresh, the anthropologist and manufacturer of altarpieces Edilberto Jiménez arrived in Chungui by assignment from a NGO. It marked the beginning of severals journeys that will change for ever his art and his life. This popular artist of Ayacucho, heir of a familiar tradition, get to know violence in his native town, but stories he listened in Chungui turned pale all the horrors he could have witness before. Shocked by the testimonies of survivors, Edilberto Jiménez began to draw in his notebook everything he listened. Years after, in Lima, he worked on a production of altarpieces on the same subject.

Based on this theme, the director Felipe Degregori realises this documentary “Chungui, horror without tears…a peruvian story” of 62 minutes of duration, where the audience discovers, through the look of Edilberto, some of the most dramatic episodes of a war which kept going at a population who, for its natives roots and a secular exclusion, nearly didn’t exist for the rest of the country. Untill today, Chungi’s people are still waiting for help from the State and the peruvian society to get over desertion and poverty, breaches they suffered since the colonial time and that the chronicler from Ayacucho Guamán Poma de Ayala, dealt with describing it in his work “La Nueva Cronica y Buen Gobierno” (New chronicle and Good Government).